THE UNCLE BUTTERFLY PAPERS
Created and performed by Maggie Rose Paine
A short film of three poems by Maggie Rose Paine, presented at the DAT Festival in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, 2024.
In this fresh new work, Maggie Rose Paine gives new meaning to the phrase ‘word play.
The Uncle Butterfly Papers is a dizzying array of language which she spins like discs on a stick, juggling them, somersaulting them, interrogating them, turning them inside out and upside down. Referencing all manner of popular and extremely unpopular culture, she literally plays with the words on the page.
Her work and words are ball- and vagina-breaking, she fart-arses her way through her lexicons, refusing absolutely everything — rules, politeness, linguistic paradigms. Her glorious clashes of meaning and metaphor are giving rise to a totally new and unique grammar.
And she has created this rude, raunchy, desperately funny prose, poetry, limerick, song mash-up that begs belief in its virtuosity, scope, capacity for surprise, and shock and delight.
Responses to the work
“I find myself travelling into a world that is familiar; labyrinthine and puzzling, yet affirming.”
“An outpouring of vitality and enthusiasm!”
“An embracing of life with appetite and gusto!”
“Perhaps the right song to sing in the face of absurdity is the one that praises the absurd. It seems that this is what Maggie Rose is offering up to us.”
“TUBP invites us to take the ‘medicine’ offered, go back out into the world improved and better able to manage some of life’s challenging, unjust, abrasive absurdities.”
“The author’s love of her characters and her material is palpable, even those whose behaviour is less than noble and those who offend our aesthetic.”
“The author’s job is to disturb!”
“There are vigorous, vital statements with their own internal logic, rhythm and colour:
‘No you don’t you jailbird you’
‘Yes no ok ok that’s quite enough’
‘Peace funding not bulk funding we’re not funny people’
“There is skilled reincorporation of ideas and a satisfying sense of ‘always returning’. Maggie Rose has chosen her material from nearby, fashioned a new thing and presented it back to us. She works her seam.”
“An outpouring of vitality and enthusiasm!
An embracing of life with appetite and gusto!
Thanks for the springboard, the gift, the invigoration!
I’m alive!”